Exemplary embodiments relate to policy based management systems, and more specifically, to the discoverability of policy enforcement points in a managed environment.
There have been significant developments in the area of policy based computing. The development of policy based computing is expected to simplify and reduce the cost of system administration, while increasing the quality of service. Policy based computing allows an administrator to specify a set of rules to guide the operations of a computer system. The techniques of policy based computing are especially applicable to the area of autonomic computing.
Some examples of policies include a policy that would re-allocate storage and notify the user when specific performance requirements are not met, and a policy that specifies a specific type of service be assigned to a user with specific attributes, e.g. a user associated with a specific company or a specific Internet protocol (IP) address.
In the field of on-demand computing, policy management becomes an important element in managing the environment. In order to adaptively respond to changes in resource requirements it should be possible to change policies easily, effectively and rapidly, in response to changing conditions. These changing conditions can be viewed as being generated by, as non-limiting examples, changes in laws, rules or regulations in a particular country; an occurrence of an unforeseen event that can cause a ripple effect throughout a network of computers; or a data center experiencing a rapid up/down surge in requests for processing.
The typical practice in using policies is that policies are created first, and then applied against customer requirements specified in a contract. Once created, the policies are applied with the expectation that the environment can be controlled in meeting the customer requirements.
In general, in conventional practice the policy statements are static, meaning that once they are created and activated, they cannot be changed. If a policy change is required, based on changing business and/or environment conditions, it is necessary to create a new policy reflecting the desired change(s) and to then replace the prior, out-dated policy statement with the newly created policy statement. However, this can be a cumbersome and time consuming process, especially since the required policy change may be quite small, while the amount of effort needed to create the new policy, verify and activate it may be substantially greater.